Welcome to our family website!

I would like to welcome everyone to our family website. My name is Nancy (Kudek) Verhelst. In 1994 I started working on the following families:

BACKHAUS - BREMSER - SCHEID - TERLINDEN

These are my direct descendants and I've been hooked on genealogy ever since! What a wonderful journey this has been. Eventually I came to the realization that I have inherited courage and strength from my ancestors. I am proud of my heritage as everyone should be.

A few years back I heard a song by Brule who is of the Lakota Native American heritage and was adopted by a couple in Minnesota. He never knew that he was adopted until after his parents passed away and that is when he wrote the following song which speaks volumes here:

If I could talk to my great grandfathers,

I would say the old times are gone.

So much has changed

But Love, like the Wind, is still here

When all else fades away

Faith, Hope and Love will remain

Those feelings that are so strong, so mysterious

Will always be with us.

I think of you, my relatives

And I thank you!

MATERNA and VERHELST

I am moving the above two families to their own websites soon. It is actually easier to leave them here but these websites are free for anyone to use. The bad news is that you are limited to how much space they allow. The BACKHAUS and BREMSER families are huge and still growing with information that I have documented so therefore, I need to free up some space here.

In 2009, I added the MATERNA family. This family history is still a work-in-progress but I have gone as far as I can with it until I receive further information from other family members. This is actually the family of my aunt, Gretchen (Materna) Backus. I started this project as a special favor to her (I had to beg her to let me do this for her) because she was always there for me in my younger years whenever I needed advice. Thank you, Gretchen! See the following new website:

In 2012, I will be including the VERHELST family which is my husband's side of the family. This is also a work-in-progress yet so please watch for it in the near future! The majority of this project was given to me by Ralph Veldboom so I do not take credit for any of this except for my husband, Jack's immediate family. Ralph sends me updates via email and I will include them as I receive them. See the following new website:

My goal is to bring alive the history of our families and how they lived, not just give you names and dates. If you have any stories to share, questions or are interested in linking with our families, please contact me at the email address below:

I welcome any additional information that you are willing to contribute. This is also your website and not just mine so I would love to hear from all of you. Please send me any personal stories, history or pictures that you have about these families and I will gladly add them to this website. I have included several sections for pictures, heirloom pictures, stories, and general history among other interests.

Just click on any of the options on the left side of this page to read articles about our families. If you find any errors please let me know and I will correct them. When it comes to genealogy, it is not easy to maintain accuracy but we do appreciate input and/or corrections!

There is one additional comment that I have to make. About a year after I started my project in 1994, I submitted information in good faith to several websites not knowing at the time that I would not be able to update or delete outdated information. As of today, this obsolete information is still on those websites. It involved 125 individuals that I had entered in my software program thinking that I was done with this project...silly me, right? Today I have over 10,000 individuals and it's still growing! So if anyone comes across this outdated information, please contact me at the above email address and I will gladly send you an update.

Hope we make a "Cousin Connection"!

IN MEMORY OF A SPECIAL COUSIN:

Daniel Anton Backus

Born: April 15, 1965

Died: July 30, 2002

Dan and Penny Backus

I would like to dedicate this family project to a special cousin who passed away at an early age. His name was Daniel Anton Backus. He had such a zest for life and he is sorely missed. I would like to share a special memory that I have of him.

At Dan’s funeral service, they had a special notebook lying on a table so that anyone who had a special memory of Dan could write it in this book. Immediately, something came to my mind and here is what I wrote:

When Dan was around eight years old, I drove to Hastings to visit with the family and took my mother and two of my stepchildren along from my first marriage who were close in age to Dan and his sisters. While there, we decided to spend a day at Apple River inner tubing down the rapids. There were two requirements; one was that you could wear your clothes rather than a swim suit and the other was that you had to wear tennis shoes while tubing. All of us piled into the station wagon and off we went! When we arrived in the parking lot at Apple River, Dan began to cry because he realized that he had forgotten his tennis shoes. Well, there were rules in the family and his parents said that he was NOT allowed to go because of no tennis shoes. When Dan got out of the vehicle, there sat a pair of tennis shoes right on the pavement next to the station wagon as if they were just waiting for him!

With his parent’s permission, they allowed him to use these shoes while tubing the Apple River because after all, there was no one around to claim them. When we were ready to leave for the day to go home, Dan wanted to take the shoes along home with him but that was also not allowed. He was told to leave them for some other little boy for another day!